A Christmas Story, released in 1983, has become an American classic for the Christmas season — a colorful depiction of life in Hohman, Indiana, in the 1940s unlike any other. Decades later, the man behind the film saw a much darker fate.
It was April 4, 2007, and 67-year-old Bob Clark, the director of A Christmas Story, was driving away from his Pacific Palisades condo in Los Angeles, California, with his 22-year-old son Ariel Hanrath-Clark. The two were headed for Santa Monica, but only minutes after getting on the road, a 2007 GMC Yukon hit the Clarks’ 1997 Infiniti sedan head-on.
With debris and wreckage left all over the road, eyewitnesses called 911 around 2:24 a.m. After paramedics and police arrived on the scene, at about 2:34 a.m., Clark and his son Ariel were pronounced dead.
The man who hit and killed the Clarks was Hector Manuel Velazquez-Nava, an illegal alien from Mexico with a criminal record.
Velazquez-Nava, police soon learned, had a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit when he caused the head-on collision. Velazquez-Nava was arrested and charged with vehicular manslaughter, drunk driving, and driving without a license.
It was not the first time Velazquez-Nava had a run-in with the law.
In March 2005, Velazquez-Nava was convicted for soliciting a prostitute in southern Los Angeles and was found to not have a valid driver’s license. For that conviction, the illegal alien was sentenced to 24 months probation and given a $1,500 fine.
Los Angeles County’s sanctuary policy, which shields criminal illegal aliens from arrest and deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, ensured that Velazquez-Nava was never turned over to agents. Instead, he was released back into the community.
Michael Levine, Clark’s former publicist, told Bill O’Reilly at the time that Clark was a “very talented and gentle man, a man who was frankly underappreciated by our industry.”
“It’s a nauseating, grotesque injustice that this man was killed and his son was killed,” Levine said.
“Two people are dead. Who should we see about that,” Levine continued. “And the politicians don’t get it. This would not have happened — in fact, if this were a moral society, this family should be able to sue the federal government for criminal neglect. Of course, it won’t happen.”
In August 2007, Velazquez-Nava pleaded no contest to two felony counts of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. Two months later, he was sentenced to six years in prison.
In 2011, Velazquez-Nava pleaded guilty to illegal reentry to the U.S. For this conviction, Velazquez-Nava was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release.
“The two-party system is collapsed,” talk radio host Doug McIntyre said, months before Velazquez-Nava’s plea deal. “You have the Republicans selling out to corporate as cheap labor and the Democrats selling out for customers, for social welfare programs and demographic futures for city council races.”
Clark’s A Christmas Story has played on loop for 24 hours on Christmas day since 1997 on TNT and since 2004 on TBS.
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